Animal Appetite

very nice girl. I wonder whatever happened to her.”
    “If I find out,” I promised, “I’ll let you know.”
    And the next morning, Tuesday, I began to trace the heretofore untraceable Tracy. Even with my extensive network of dog people to tap, even with a last name, the search took a while. Tracy Littlefield did not belong to any of the local dog clubs. When I supplied the name Littlefield, people said, “Oh, yeah! Littlefield! Tracy Littlefield!”
    “Tall,” I’d add. “Quiet. Shy. But nice.”
    And the person would say, “Yeah! That’s her!”
    But Tracy Littlefield did belong to one dog organization. She was a current member of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me spell it out: The disaster area in breed rescue isn’t an earthquake in some distant city, but a local highway where someone’s stopped briefly to throw out the family pet or a pound where the owner has turned in the dog with all the regret I’d feel in tossing an empty bottle in a bin for someone else to recycle. Anyway, Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue was (and still is) one of the oldest and most efficient breed-rescue organizations in the country. Tracy Littlefield belonged. According to a friend of mine who had the membership list, Tracy lived in Ellsworth, Maine. I also got her phone number.
    A woman answered. “Tracy’s Doggone Salon!” Instead of blurting out questions about Jack Andrews, I calmly asked whether I was speaking to Tracy. When the woman said yes, I made a quick decision. I also made an appointment. Tracy could fit Kimi in the next afternoon. Ellsworth, Maine, is where Down East really begins. It’s the coastal town where you turn off Route 1 to get to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Ellsworth is about 250 miles from Cambridge. That’s a long way to go to get a dog groomed. The distance seemed like nothing. I had the creepy sense that in meeting Tracy, I’d find myself at long last face to face with Jack Andrews.
     

Twenty-Four

     
    Owls Head, Maine, boasts two principal tourist attractions—the Owls Head lighthouse and the Museum of Transportation—and, in the person of my father, a one-man tourist repellent. When my mother was alive, summer visitors used to pull to the side of the road to take snapshots of her perennial garden. Every once in a while, an out-of-stater would march up to our freshly painted front door, rap the polished brass knocker, and issue a brazen offer to buy the place. My father always responded by making a prompt counteroffer on the bidder’s spouse or children. These days when the cars slow down, my father misinterprets the dropped jaws, and when a bargain-hunter condescends to inquire about taking the place off his hands, he continues to propose the kinds of wife-for-barn and child-for-house swaps that weren’t funny to begin with and now, I fear, strike the tourists as serious and scary. My own visits home have gradually become less and less frequent. Steve, the most mellow of men, balks at accompanying me.
    After I dropped Steve at the airport early on Wednesday morning to catch a flight to Minneapolis for a belated Thanksgiving with his mother, I reminded myself of the many reasons I’d refused to go with him. Let me just report that on my last visit, Steve’s mother served green slime with miniature marshmallows and fake mayonnaise at every meal except breakfast for three days in a row. On individual plates. No cheating. At lunch on the fourth day—this is the truth—she left the room and, in desperation, I fed The Blob to her cocker, who waited until his mistress came back to return my gift, which had turned to a slimy semiliquid that looked like pond scum swarming with monster-size maggots and obviously hadn’t been safe to ingest to begin with. The rug was white. Originally. Mine was the only clean plate on the table. When a dog betrays me, I know I’m someplace I don’t belong.
    I headed north, picked up 95, and, staying far west of Owls Head, took the highway to Bangor before cutting over to the coast. In case your image of Maine comes from television and the movies, I should mention that Ellsworth possesses a downtown with small shops, a little river, a bridge, an old-fashioned movie theater, and the mandatory historic house. The de facto center of Ellsworth, however, is a wide strip of heavily mall-lined road that ends where Route 1 makes a sharp left and sprints north toward Washington County and away from the tourists